Project Members

Computational and quantitative methods in historical linguistics

Figure: A succesful simulation of the distribution of speaker populations (filled circles) compared with the empirical distribution (open circles) and a simulation with different parameter settings (line)

In applying computational and statistical methods to large lexical and typological dataset and supplementing empirical data with computer simulations, we tried to address questions such as: How fast do different elements of language change? How can we classify all of the world's languages consistently? How did the present distribution of languages come about?

The Automated Similarity Judgment Program was a large part of this endeavour.